About 9,000-km highway plans locked in land

At a time when developing infrastructure remains the government's focus area, about 9,000 km of the sanctioned road projects of 30,000 km under the National Highways Authority of India are stuck in disputes concerning land, forest clearance or other matters.

"About 30 per cent of (land for) the 30,000 km of road projects under the National Highways Development Project is still to be acquired owing to land disputes, forest clearance, or (things like shifting electricity poles), causing invariable delay," road transport and highways secretary Brahm Dutt told PTI.

There are several such projects in the North-South and East-West corridors, apart from the Golden Quadrilateral project, he said.

Several projects worth hundreds of crores of rupees remain badly hit in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Orissa, a factor that has caused the NHAI to face flak from the Planning Commission and Committee on Infrastructure, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Road alignment was required to be changed in Assam because the projects were near the Kaziranga National Park while shifting electricity poles posed severe problems in executing projects in Maharashtra and Karnataka, Dutt said.

Projects in West Bengal were getting delayed due to land disputes, he added.

Peeved with delays in highway projects, the government on January 21 set a month's deadline for the NHAI to resolve issues responsible for slow implementation.

Transport minister T R Baalu has directed Transport secretary Dutt and NHAI chairman Brijeshwar Singh to take up matters pertaining to delay in highway projects with the state governments concerned.

These include 14 World Bank-aided projects in Uttar Pradesh and 13 projects supported by the Asian Development Bank [Get Quote] in UP and Madhya Pradesh.

He also asked the NHAI to ensure that the ongoing Golden Quadrilateral projects in West Bengal and Orissa are completed by March 2009.

"(More than) half of the 60 NHAI projects for which bids were invited in 2008 failed to (attract even a single developer)," an NHAI official told PTI.

As many as 34 of these projects had no bidders while in the case of five only one bid was received for each, he said, adding that private developers termed these projects 'unlucrative' and the NHAI had extended the dates of bids in many cases.

"We are referring the single-bid projects to the Central Vigilance Commission for a final decision whether to go ahead with (them) or re-tender the projects," the transport secretary said.